The Female Voice of Reason
by Zip Goes A Million
Summary: Modern AU. One-shot. Set around Christmas time. Sybil wakes up to find that Tom and his friends have got drunk and have made Sybil's house completely indistinguishable to what it was when she last saw it. Just a bit of fun - not really a story for any purpose at all.


**The Female Voice of Reason**

Sybil looked around the room. It was thoroughly trashed. It looked as if a bomb had hit it… and then somebody had used it like a mixing bowl – stirring all the damage together until it became almost entirely irreparable. It was also freezing. The windows were open and possibly had been all night. Sybil had just woken up. She knew that Tom had had a load of friends around the night before. The thing was, Sybil found it strange that they could make this much mess – she had known all of those men for years, and she'd never seen them make so much mess anywhere. She had left the boys to themselves and had gone to bed early in order to avoid them. It's not that she didn't like them, but she knew that Tom hadn't seen them all together in a long time and she thought that perhaps they might need some quality time together without a female voice of reason ruling over what they do. And anyway, Sybil was completely knackered. She'd had the week from hell at work and hadn't had any time to stop and rest. And now, in her Christmas pyjamas and pale blue dressing down, knowing that, having just woken up, she probably looked awful, she made the decision to make some tea for both herself and Tom – if Tom was too tired to wake up then she would happily drink his tea – and then begin trying to put the living room in some sort of order. She tried to fight her way to the kitchen, doing her best not to step on anything other than carpet, but when she finally got there, the kitchen didn't look much better than the living room. The entire ground floor of her house was complete mayhem. She shoved some things to the side so that there was enough room near the kettle for her to make a few mugs of tea. As she waited for the kettle to boil she looked around the room carefully and wondered what Tom and his friends had done last night. But then she remembered. Just as she had kissed Tom and gone up to bed the night before, she had noticed that one of Tom's friends had a rather large crate of beer. They can't have drunk all of that between the five of them, though, surely? That can't be good for them! But Sybil had come to the conclusion that it was probably the alcohol that made this mess – not really the conscious minds of her husband and his friends. The kettle finished boiling and Sybil made the coffee, adding a little milk to both mugs and a teaspoon of sugar to Tom's, stirring the mix to make the sugar dissolve. She picked the mugs up and carried them through the sorry excuse for a living room until she reached the stairs – which, surprisingly, looked exactly the same as they did when she climbed them the night before. It wasn't long before she reached the bedroom. Tom was sleeping just as Sybil had left him, so Sybil put the mugs down on her bedside table, sat down in bed, wrapped an arm around him and kissed his shoulder, as he was facing away from her. He turned around in bed, but put a hand to his head. He obviously had a headache. He sat up slowly and opened his mouth, but Sybil spoke before he could say anything. "Yes, you're hung over my lovely. I have very little sympathy! And I've never seen you hung over before – you usually tend to be able to deal with quite a lot of alcohol," she said with a grin. She handed him his tea. "Here, this should sober you up a bit. Do you have any idea what happened last night… any recollection at all?" Tom just shook his head. "Oh dear. Are you going to help me clean up your mess downstairs?" Tom tipped his head slightly to one side and frowned with a mouthful of tea. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" Tom said nothing, but shrank back slightly, feeling ashamed that he'd got completely and utterly hammered while his wife was sleeping in the same house and he had clearly left some sort of mark of that downstairs, as his wife had just told him. But he had no idea just how bad the damage was. He hadn't been downstairs yet. Sybil stayed in bed to drink her tea and teased Tom about his lack of ability to remember what exactly had happened.

Once she had finished her tea she got out of bed and put on a pair of bright red skinny jeans and a knitted wool jumper with a repeated reindeer pattern. Despite the skinny jeans, which were fairly new, so quite soft, Sybil's legs were still cold, so she pulled on a pair of knee-high socks over her jeans, which had Christmas trees on them. Tom had sobered up enough to be able to speak now. "You look very festive!" he sipped his tea and looked at his wife. She straightened out her side of the duvet and sat on top of it next to Tom.  
"Why shouldn't I be? It's Christmas day in six days. Remember?" Tom looked surprised at the fact, so just sat and looked into his tea. "Don't worry, dear. It's just the alcohol from last night. You'll remember soon enough. If you come downstairs, maybe the Christmas tree, the cards and the tinsel around the mirror will remind you. Also, maybe the mess will remind you of what happened last night. You and your friends have turned my house into a tip, Tom!" Sybil said as she walked out of the room. Tom wanted to know what Sybil meant, so he scrambled out of bed whilst wearing his boxers and wandered downstairs to catch her up. As he turned the corner of the stairs he saw what the problem was.  
"Bloody hell! What happened here?" Tom asked in a loud voice, noticing after he spoke that his voice was far too loud.  
"You lot happened here!" Sybil laughed, as she tried to tackle her way to the opposite side of the room so that she could put some music on to make the job of making her house look respectable a little more fun. She found a CD entitled White Christmas, put it into the CD player and pressed play. She didn't care what songs she listened to, as long as they were Christmassy. She turned it up so that it was loud enough to hear across the other side of the room, but not so loud as to make it impossible to hear her husband speak to her. Tom went to the kitchen to find some painkillers for his headache, while Sybil began sorting out the chaos. She started with the sofa cushions which were piled up behind the sofa. Sybil had no idea why they were piled up there, but she wasn't going to waste time wondering what her drunken husband was doing last night with his mates. She sang along to _Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire_ as she began to put the room right again. She brought the bin to the centre of the room so that she could put beer bottles, plastic cups, squashed food and random bits of cardboard that seemed to have come from nowhere into it. Then she tried to straighten up the rug, but found that one of Tom's friends had left a t-shirt at their house, which was completely sodden with alcohol and making the floor wet too. Sybil decided to quickly put it in the washing machine. She'd clean the carpet up later. It already had stains of wine and mud all over it, despite the fact that she and Tom had only lived there for six months or so. They were planning on getting a new carpet after Christmas, so she didn't mind too much. Four hours later, Tom had sobered up and Sybil had tidied and cleaned the whole of downstairs so that now it was spotless and smelled quite nice too. Tom had got dressed and was wearing one of his jumpers that was far too big for him, but was comfortable and that he knew Sybil loved. In a way it was a type of sorry for making so much mess the night before.

Sybil was in the process of making another cup of tea when Tom snuck up behind her and wrapped his arms around her middle. She squealed at first. But soon she was nuzzling her head into his neck. "I love you," he whispered into her ear slowly.  
"Only because I clear up after all of your mess!" Sybil said with a laugh. Tom kissed her cheek and whispered back,  
"How about you make me a cup of tea, and I'll put _Love Actually_ on? Sound like a plan?"  
"A very good one," Sybil said, turning around to kiss her husband. The kettle boiled and Tom pulled away, keeping his hands on her hips. But then he walked back into the living room to get the film ready. Sybil poured the hot water into the mugs and stirred, adding sugar and milk along the way. Then she carefully carried the steaming mugs into the living room where her husband was already sitting on the sofa with the remote control in his hand, ready to press play. He took his tea and Sybil sat next to him, snuggling as close as possible to him. Tom pressed play and there they sat, watching one brilliant Christmas film in their own house with their own lives on their own time. Their life wasn't far from perfect and they were both so happy to have each other.

* * *

_I know it's nowhere near Christmas, but oh well! I hope you enjoyed the story anyway._


End file.
